Amused and Alarmed

NeverEnding Story

Rewatched The NeverEnding Story yesterday. It hasn't been very long since I last saw it. Maybe three years at most. But this time, for whatever reason, something clicked into place and it became very, very obvious that I was watching something where the director/screenwriter (Wolfgang Petersen, also the director of Das Boot) was a German born during WWII, adapting a book by a German author/screenwriter (Michael Ende) who was also a kid during WWII (not to mention the son of an artist classed as "degenerate" by the Nazi regime. When the Nazis tried to draft him in 1945, he was 14. He joined the resistance instead.) The film is not a generic (though great) story about believing in your dreams and imagination beyond childhood. Instead, it's a movie by an adult grappling with the aftermath of a society that tore itself apart with savage monstrosity, trying to figure out how one could possibly rebuild.

In this context, the "look like big, good, strong hands" Rock Biter sequence is even more heartbreaking. As children, and as teenagers, how many times must Petersen and Ende have asked their parents and respected adults, "how could you let this happen?" How could this nation that was so full of art and life and science and medicine and myth not be strong enough to save beloved friends from being blown away by nothing? All around Atreyu and the Rock Biter, the sky is full of lightning bolts - the insignia of the SS, the namesake of blitzkreig (lightning war); the only non-swastika symbol more associated with the Nazis is the black wolf, and look, here's Gmork, servant of the power behind the Nothing.

The back end of Ende's book is about Bastian, but Petersen doesn't care about Bastian as anything but an audience stand-in ("They were with him when he took the book with the Auryn symbol on the cover." That extra metalayer, as far as I know, doesn't exist in the book.) The movie doesn't waste time resolving Bastian's relationship with his father or his difficulty balancing fantasy with the demands of real life (which is what the bulk of the book is devoted to). The plot point Petersen cares about is: A kid from outside this world that tore itself apart can ressurect the parts that are worth resurrecting, reimagine the parts that aren't, and go from there.

This reading of the film resolves one of the things that always bothered me as a kid, which is Bastian running down the real-world bullies on the back of a luck dragon as a triumphant ending. I was a pretty literal-minded child who was happy to pretend but nevertheless committed to distinguishing between "real" and "not real." (My family has schizophrenic tendencies, so being able to make this distinction was highly encouraged.) It seemed to me that although, sure, a made-up world could know about the real world, and someone from the real world could (symbolically or literally) alter a fantasy world, nobody from a book was ever going to jump out and swordfight my enemies. Is Bastian a superhero now? Can other people who have fantasies also summon magic into the real world, and if so, why has that not been present prior to this point in the story? (As I said, literal-minded.)

But it turns out that's exactly, expressly what Petersen is saying. He's saying the way you fight bullies in the real world - the way you stop Nazis - is by having more compelling fantasies than they do and making sure everybody can see that.

In support of Petersen's extremely serious call to fantastical arms, it's worth noting that the recent ressurection of the far right is pulling in PoMo gray-on-gray Gen-Xers, not Millenials - whose famed conscientiousness, academic researchers have suggested, may come from having grown up reading anti-racist propaganda in the form of Harry Potter.

He's saying the way you fight bullies in the real world - the way you stop Nazis - is by having more compelling fantasies than they do and making sure everybody can see that.

I have been saying all this election season, when people around me express incredulity that someone as resolutely false and repugnant as Trump could have gathered so much belief and loyalty, that it's not about Trump himself, it's about the story he's telling. He's telling a story that a lot of people want to be true—however reprehensible I find it, it wouldn't catch on like wildfire if it didn't appeal. Narrative is the best way to hack the human brain. There has to be a better story.

Thank you for this reading; I bounced fairly strongly off The NeverEnding Story when I was shown it for the first time in college, but now I want to watch it again.